Fall 2004

An ink-stained wretch no more, Joe Battenfeld wears a white T-shirt and dress pants as he walks through the Boston Common and up Beacon Street, carrying a camera-friendly suit jacket and a button-down shirt in a plastic dry-cleaning bag as he trods familiar ground. In a dozen years as a political reporter for the Boston(...)

For the first time in more than a decade, voters in most Massachusetts communities will see a Republican candidate for state representative on their ballots this fall. (Also see State of the States). Republican candidates are filling in gaps where there had been no GOP candidates two years ago just about everywhere except the state’s(...)

Optimism, pessimism, and the American psyche

In 1980, Republican presidential nominee Ronald Reagan, running against Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter, asked voters, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Note that he said “you,” not “we” or “the United States.” Reagan believed that when things get better for individuals, society is better off; since his victorious campaign, few American(...)

You would think that traveling with a 2-year-old would be enough to discourage trips halfway around the world. But when Primary Source, a regional professional development group, invited us on a two-week tour of China for “education leaders,” my wife and I jumped at the chance. For me, the trip represented an opportunity to explore(...)

The Good City: Writers Explore 21st-Century Boston Edited by Emily Hiestand and Ande Zellman Boston, Beacon Press, 175 pages. July’s Democratic National Convention did not, as it turned out, produce most of the consequences predicted in the seemingly endless pre-convention hype. Neither the calamitous prophecies of the Boston Herald—which portrayed the coming DNC as a(...)

Massachusetts has been long recognized as possessing unique capacities at producing innovations that have changed the nation and the world. Whether its residents are especially gifted or they take advantage of the region’s rich institutional and financial resources, the Bay State distinguishes itself as an incubator for new ideas that work. Such new ideas and(...)

Ken Chase is running for Congress, he says, to give voters a choice.”Fundamentally, there is a corruption of the process at the congressional level,” says the Medford native, who graduated from Malden Catholic High School and Boston College. “The crushing majority of races are not races at all, or there is just token opposition.” But(...)

In the first week of October, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court heard arguments in the Hancock school finance case. The arguments addressed the opinion issued last April by Superior Court Judge Margot Botsford that funding is constitutionally inadequate in the districts of those who brought the suit and, by extension, in high-poverty districts across the(...)

LEVERETT—It’s the only municipality in the US named Leverett, and residents of this small Massachusetts town like to think it’s unique. Leverett was one of the first places in the country to officially call for the repeal of certain provisions of the 2001 USA Patriot Act. As one of the state’s most liberal communities, it(...)

June 15, 1993: an important day for education in Massachusetts. On that day, the Supreme Judicial Court issued its decision in McDuffy v. Secretary of Education and defined the Commonwealth’s duty to educate all public school students, without regard to their personal wealth or poverty, and without regard to their district’s fiscal capacity. The SJC(...)